Combat Fatigue: The Beginning of the End

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A modest prophecy.

By Daniel Krupa

"First-person shooters sell like crazy, so there's not really a strong demand for anything else," said Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima in an interview given earlier this year. He identified the dominance of this one genre above all as chiefly responsible for what he perceives to be a lack of innovation in video games – "that's why [original ideas] stop being made. People are satisfied with making minor upgrades and tweaking things here and there – as long as that's the landscape, it will keep on happening."

He evokes a bleak and barren landscape, a place where innovation is trampled beneath a generic military boot. And while things might not be quite that depressing, it's undeniable that the popularity and profitability of the first-person shooter has exerted a worrying influence on the games around it.

Take Resident Evil, for instance. Series producer Masachika Kawata recently admitted that the franchise has consciously moved away from survival horror, becoming more action-orientated, in a bid to remain competitive in a market where the FPS is king. "Looking at the marketing data [for survival horror games]... the market is small, compared to the number of units Call of Duty and all those action games sell," he said. "A survival horror Resident Evil doesn't seem like it'd be able to sell those kind of numbers." The strategy is simple: to sell like Call of Duty your game has to be more like Call of Duty.

But nothing lasts forever, and no genre remains undeposed. Not even the shooter. In fact, the end has already begun. And I'm not just referring to sales figures. Yes, a couple of weeks ago Gamasutra reported that life-to-date sales of Modern Warfare 3 were falling behind the franchise's previous instalment, Black Ops, by an estimated 4.2%. Activision's coveted IP was now in decline. Could this really be happening? Analysts and pundits speculated why this might be: the rise of smartphone and tablet gaming, decent competition in the shape of Battlefield 3 and general market-wide decline in game sales. This might have just been a weird anomaly: Amazon revealed this week that its day-one pre-orders of Black Ops II are 10 times that of the original Black Ops, and approximately 30% higher than Modern Warfare 3's pre-order sales. Sales may continue to rise in the short-term, but you only have to look at the games themselves for more reliable signs that the genre is approaching its decline.

The Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky once wrote that all artistic forms travel down "the inevitable road from birth to death": initially, a genre brims with possibility, but with every game, sequel and reboot, those ideas are expended and that potential evaporates, until the genre eventually becomes a dull imitation of itself.

And this overfamiliarity with the FPS has led to a kind of numbness: a shrug of the shoulders and a complaint that it just looks like Call of Duty. To combat this apathy, each new title must emphasise its uniqueness. All games do this, but within the FPS genre, the desire to standout is especially pronounced. It's almost as if they're all secretly worried about looking the same. (So many of them use the same game engine this is more than just figurative concern.) The games do themselves no favours, of course, selecting the most generic imagery and insipid titles. This year will see the release of Sniper 2: Ghost Warrior and Sniper V2 Elite (admittedly, a third-person shooter), Enemy Front and Alien Fear, Warface and Warfighter. (Isn't there another word for Warfighter? Yes, soldier.)

Developer Stuart Black.

A lot of titles are straining for originality to distinguish themselves from numerous competitors. Outspoken British game designer Stuart Black knows his shooters. He worked on Criterion's acclaimed Black, Bodycount (before leaving the project), and is now developing Enemy Front at City Interactive. And he believes this desire to standout, to compete with the high-ranking shooters (Call of Duty, Battlefield, Halo), has let sloppiness seep into the genre. "They've concentrated on other things, on additional features," says Black. "Getting lots of USPs – unique selling points – or whatever. Bullet points for the back of the box. And the shooting experience kind of gets left on the side, almost taking for granted. 'Oh yeah, there will be shooting – but what the **** can you do with shooting? It's just shooting.'"

But the central shooting mechanic is paramount for Black. "There's a lot you can do with shooting to make it feel really good. I'm an FPS fan. Just as a player I love playing FPSs. So I get them all and have a play. 9 times out 10, as soon as a load up and start moving around, I shoot a few times, and I'm disappointed. Even the effect on the world with my firing isn't any good or the movement of the players isn't very nice or the turning arc isn't very good. Generally, there's always something where I'm like, 'Yeah, I can walk up the walls. Or turn back ******* time. Or who knows what other feature stuff is in there. But when it comes to squeezing the trigger: meh."

For Black, the future of the genre lies in formal refinement, not story, not character, not setting. For others though, it's the search for authenticity. Meanwhile, senior creative director Richard Farrelly at Danger Close, the studio behind Warfighter, believes the future of the genre lies in authenticity. It's all about "the immersion factor – making the players feel like they're experiencing what these guys experience. Especially when you start talking next-gen consoles, the level of fidelity you'll be able to get with the audio, the visuals, even with the feel of the controls. I think that's where it's going to go."

And there are first-person shooters that are transcending the genre's conventions. BioShock and Deus Ex look beyond the trenches past and present, putting greater emphasis on an interesting setting and narrative. But they are the notable exceptions, not the rules.

Parody is usually a reliable indicator that a genre is tottering towards the end of its lifecycle, since a parody can only really work if the audience it overly-familiar with that genre's conventions. Scream did this brilliantly in the mid-Nineties, but only because it could play off nearly two decades worth of genre literacy. Post-Scream, the horror genre had to reinvent itself or risk repeating Scream's gags.

Last year Bulletstorm did something similar for the testosterone-soaked FPS, with its hyper-macho grunts and knowing dialogue. Players are instructed to "Kill fast ****hole" and reminded that there is "More flesh between us and our goal." It's so gratuitous, so extravagantly violent, that it becomes a ridiculously enjoyable shooter in its own right. But not enough people bought or played Bulletstorm, and so the conventions of the FPS remain largely undisturbed.

From the new Black Ops II trailer it seems as if Call of Duty has realised that it must push the envelope, not in terms of gratuitous violence and the use of sensation (no blowing up children this time, hopefully), but by challenging the expectations of its audience. I could be wrong, and shooting side-saddle in Black Ops 2 may well prove to be the unlikeliest of game-changers -- that off-the-wall idea that extends the reign of the FPS another 10 years. But deep down, I suspect it's really a sign that the traditional military FPS has exhausted its possibilities, and decided to put you on a horse for want of a bigger tank.

New genres emerge when the current ones have outlived their usefulness. Old discarded genres can even be recycled. The Western has even experienced an unlikely revival at the cinema. And at the moment, there is no shortage of games doing interesting things: Asura's Wrath, Dear Esther, Fez, and Journey. Some of them are even challenging the working definition of what a game is and can be. Are they impatiently waiting in the wings?

But even if I'm wrong, and the military shooter reigns for another 10 years, its demise will still come about due to the existence of an even more powerful mechanism. It's situations like this when you have to look at literature or film for a history lesson. No genre is constant in popularity, and to think that the first-person shooter is any different would be wilful ignorance. Video games are still very much in their infancy compared to other arts, and it's this lack of tradition which makes the reign of the FPS seem potentially unending. It's exactly this warped historical perspective that lies behind Kojima's elegy for innovation.

In literature, a strange pattern emerges when you look at the most popular genres over a long period of time. A range of different types of books emerge, but only a handful become very popular, and they stay in place, unchallenged, for 25-30 years. But eventually this gives way to a period of intense innovation, at the end of which a new set of genres ascend to the throne. It baffled literary critics for a while, until a realisation was made: nobody wants to read the books their parents read. The same goes for music and film, and the same will apply to games. And no teenage boy or girl, 10 years hence, will want to play Call of Duty if it's the game their dad and all his friends play.

Twenty years from now they might go back and rediscover it, and appreciate Ghillies in the Mist with a less rebellious eye, but they'll initially baulk at the prospect and buy something else, something different, and that will ultimately reform Kojima's landscape. But games are different – innovation also coalesces around new hardware, so the cycles might be even shorter. A new console, with a different set of capabilities, might support a different type of genre or, indeed, give birth to new ones.

The prophecy will be fulfilled. The first-person shooter will fall. Maybe not today but soon. This won't usher in a golden age of unbounded creativity. History will repeat itself, and another genre – maybe the RPG, maybe the two-hour game, maybe something entirely new – will exert a disproportionate influence on the market, and we'll be making the same complaints.